


So Glad You Made It

by unadrift



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Future Fic, M/M, Post Season 2
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-24
Updated: 2014-01-24
Packaged: 2018-01-09 07:23:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,390
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1143152
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unadrift/pseuds/unadrift
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Stiles is not prepared to find Derek Hale on the porch.</p>
            </blockquote>





	So Glad You Made It

**Author's Note:**

> Future fic. Canon-compliant until the end of season 2 and completely drifting off from there. Not beta'd. And, um, somewhat late? Title nicked from a song by Kane.

The knock is innocuous and not at all foreboding. It could have been the postman, the pizza guy, or Mrs. Wheeler missing one of her cats again.

It's not.

Stiles is not prepared to find Derek Hale on the porch.

"Stiles," Derek says.

To say that Derek looks like shit would be the understatement of all understatements, with those dark circles under his eyes, the new lines on his face, and the way he's kind of making himself look smaller than he really is. But there's relief as well. Probably relief that Stiles answered the door and not the sheriff.

"You look like shit," Stiles says, and yeah, he's aware that his brain-to-mouth filter hasn't improved with age or experience and neither have his social skills. This is not the way to greet someone (a friend?) you haven't seen in, what, six years?

Derek pulls his leather jacket tighter around himself. (Is that still the same leather jacket?) He visibly struggles to find words and settles on, "You look good."

"Thanks," Stiles says, cautiously.

"Can I..." Derek visibly falters, frowning. "This was a bad idea." He starts to back away.

"Yeah, no, none of that," Stiles says and grabs Derek by the sleeve. 

Derek glares at him, and, just like that, they're on familiar territory. 

Stiles would like to believe that he has grown as a person, that he picked up a few useful things over the years, about communication and patience and self-awareness. But evidence suggests that he's no better now than Derek used to be. Derek, who never met an emotional crisis he couldn't ignore the shit out of. Derek, who hasn't been subscribing to the personal growth thing, either, it seems.

They glare at each other for a little while longer, and then it's surprisingly easy to tug on Derek's sleeve some more and overcome what little resistance is offered. 

"Don't be an even bigger asshole than I remember. Come on in." 

Derek lets himself be pulled into the house, Stiles' dad's house, _through the front door_. It's surreal. Stiles has never seen him use this door before.

Stiles has been living with his dad ever since he got back from college. He can work wherever he puts his laptop, and he's got student loans to pay off, so that works in his favor. Plus, Sheriff Stilinski still cannot be trusted to make smart decisions when it comes to his own health. Stiles tells himself that this is the reason he came back to Beacon Hills in the first place. He tells himself that he could move out anytime. Money would be tight at first, but he could manage. He could leave if, say, a lady-friend situation ever arose for his dad, though it doesn't look like that's going to happen anytime soon.

Sometimes Stiles lets himself wonder if this is a chicken-and-egg kind of situation, if his moving out would get his dad to leave the house more often to meet new people. It's not something he likes to dwell on. He himself isn't missing anything. Whenever he feels like it, he goes out and picks someone up for the night. It's usually satisfying for all parties involved, and that's enough for him. He tried the long-term relationship thing at college. It sucked, like, royally. 

His dad asked him about it once, asked Stiles how he could be happy like this, never letting anyone close. Stiles had shrugged. "I'm waiting, I guess." For what, his dad thankfully didn't ask. Stiles wouldn't have had an answer.

*

Stiles is making coffee in awkward silence. He has no idea what Derek's been up to for the last six years. He seems so familiar, but if Stiles is honest, he doesn't really know the guy sitting there, frowning down at his dad's kitchen table like the piece of furniture personally offended him.

"I'm sorry," Derek says.

Stiles almost drops his dad's favorite coffee mug. Derek never apologized to him for anything before, despite an overabundance of reasons and opportunities to do so. 

"What for?" he asks, pouring the coffee.

"I left," Derek says, after a few moments of consideration.

Stiles heaves a silent sigh in the face of such enthusiastic communication, turns around and hands Derek a mug. He sits down opposite Derek and blows on his own coffee. He says, "It was the smartest decision at the time."

It's the truth. They both know it. 

Boyd and Erica had gone rogue in search of a new pack and never looked back. Stiles hasn't heard from either of them since. He doesn't want to think about what might have happened to them.

Then Lydia happened to Peter. Poetic justice, Stiles would call it, but he still shudders when he thinks about the whole thing. De-resurrection was extremely messy and completely traumatizing business. Lydia had kept Derek out of the loop, who understandably didn't take the repeat performance of that approach well. Jackson had been backing her up, of course, and there went that premium pack membership. They'd left not long after. Jackson accompanied Lydia to wherever her education and academic career took her, and he always will, because he's a completely whipped excuse for a husband. It would be cute, if he wasn't still the douchiest of all douches. Stiles doesn't talk to them often, but they visited Beacon Hills last Christmas and stopped by for a small reunion dinner.

So Lydia and Jackson left, and the rest of them planned for college, optimistically, in case the crazy Alpha Pack that had been circling and terrifying everyone wouldn't kill or maim them before it was time to go. 

The acceptance letters arrived with a fanfare, and Derek vanished without one. 

The Alpha Pack had no Alpha left to challenge and moved on. Apparently they weren't interested in a few powerless betas, and not in the Hale territory either, much like Derek had hinted at that one time. (Too remote, too small, too insignificant.) 

In Derek's mind, this probably justified everything. The Alpha Pack left Beacon Hills, everyone lived happily ever after and skipped off to college. And they did, kind of.

Scott and Allison moved to the other side of the country and never returned. They have their own little pack now, which includes Isaac and his girlfriend of two years. Both Melissa McCall and Chris Argent followed their children to the east coast not long ago. Scott still calls. Sometimes.

"I was surpised," Stiles says. "Smart decisions weren't exactly your tools of the trade back then." 

Derek's fingers twitch. "You're mad at me." 

"No shit, Sherlock."

"I apologized."

"For leaving. I heard. I'm not mad at you for leaving," Stiles says. Reasonably, he thinks. "I'm mad because you just up and vanished. You never called. You never wrote. Hell, I'd have taken smoke signals. Anything instead of radio silence. You could've been dead for all I knew."

"I'm sorry," Derek says.

"Six years, Derek. Sorry is not going to cut it."

"Then what do you want? Why do you even care?" Derek says, exasperated. "I never got that. Not back then, and not now."

"Isn't it enough that I did? That I still do? I'm glad you're alive. It's good to see you."

Derek deflates a little more and rubs a hand over his face. He looks exhausted. 

If werewolves could scar, Stiles wonders what he would see.

*

His dad lets himself in around eight, carrying a large pizza box. (It's Fast Food Wednesday, the one day of the week Stiles allows them both to indulge.)

He freezes in the doorway, takes in the scene at the kitchen table and raises both eyebrows at Stiles in wordless inquiry. Stiles only has to look at him, silent plea and reassurance at once, and his dad nods. He takes the pizza into the living room and leaves Stiles to marvel at the amount of trust they managed to rebuild after things went to shit back in the day.

With his posture even stiffer than before, Derek does his best to ignore the recent arrival.

*

"So," Stiles says. "They don't exactly roll out the red carpet for a wandering Alpha without a pack, huh?"

"No," Derek says und curls his hand tighter around the coffee cup.

"It's not like you could just turn omega. Can you turn omega? _Did_ you turn omega?"

"No," Derek says. It's a testament to his apparent exhaustion that he doesn't let his ruby-reds glow in evidence. 

"Why not settle down somewhere else? Join another pack? Oh, wait. You'd have had to take over, right? Kill their alpha? Because 'this town isn't big enough for both of us' etcetera?"

"That. And I couldn't. I'm… My roots are here."

"You didn't feel at home anywhere else," Stiles decodes. "Not enough to start building something new."

"I would have needed territory."

"Which isn't an easy thing to obtain, especially if you don't have a pack to back you up and lend you strength."

Derek looks relieved that he doesn't have to spell this all out himself. More than once, Stiles has wondered if that was why he was tolerated in the first place, because somehow he always _got_ Derek, without the need to exchange too many words.

"You're welcome here," Stiles says.

Derek meets his eyes then, relief and gratitude warring with misery, and Stiles understands. The one place that will tolerate and even welcome Derek is the place he doesn't want to be, the place that's filled with memories of even more failures the second time around, filled with guilt and shame and too many what-ifs.

"You have to start over sometime," Stiles says, and Derek lets out a harsh breath. 

The sound is like a knife to the gut. It's too much, and if it's too much for Stiles, it must be hell for Derek.

"Come on," Stiles says, motioning for Derek to get up. "It's late. You can sleep in my bed. I'll take the couch."

Derek goes without complaint, which is alarming in itself.

*

Stiles doesn't take the couch. 

Derek, already under the covers in one of Stiles' more baggy shirts and a pair of sweats, grabs his wrist and pulls until Stiles plummets onto the mattress next to him. 

"I missed you," he says.

Stiles is temporarily stunned speechless.

"Same here," he says and realizes that it's true, recognizes the vague empty spaces in his life as Derek-shaped voids, and wonders how he didn't see this sooner.

"Oh my god, I'm an idiot," he groans. 

Hormones, he'd thought. A little crush. Not much of a surprise considering Derek's looks. Just stupid teenage hormones.

"You were sixteen," Derek says.

"You knew?" Stiles squeaks. "Wait, of course, werewolf senses, I get it. But if you knew…"

Derek curls an arm around him and pulls him close. "You weren't much older than I was when Kate…" He doesn't finish the sentence, but Stiles doesn't need him to. He deduced and extrapolated from the evidence years ago. It explained so much.

"You were only sixteen," Derek repeats.

"Okay," Stiles says, because it's true. He was stupid and reckless at sixteen. Sometimes it feels like he still is.

"There's no guarantee we'll be less of a disaster now," he says. "Do you remember us? Have you grown up at all? Because I made it a point not to…"

"Stiles. Shut up." Derek's tone is tired but fond. "I'm not going anywhere. We can work on it."

Stiles shifts back into the comfortable warmth of Derek's chest and settles in, until a thought occurs to him that has him tense up again. "You're not returning to that house. I'll have it torn down before I let you squat there again, I'm not even kidding."

"You do that," Derek mumbles, already half asleep, breath hot against Stiles' neck.

Stiles will do it. He totally will. The house is nothing more than a pile of rubble, anyway. Half of it collapsed, like, two years ago. 

Maybe Derek saw, or maybe he came straight here, straight to Stiles. Stiles wants to believe he's that important.

"I will," he says.

He'd like to take a sledgehammer to that house himself, engage in some healthy release of aggression. Why hasn't he thought about this before? It might be therapeutic for Derek, too.

He falls asleep fantasizing about taking an axe to the front door of the charred remains of the Hale house.

*

Stiles descends the stairs hours earlier than is his norm. His dad is sitting at the kitchen table. They stare at each other for a long moment, then his dad says, "You're done waiting, then?"

Stiles releases a breath. "Yeah. I think I am."

His dad nods decisively and stands. "Wake him up. I'm making breakfast."

Stiles smiles. Brilliantly, he suspects. "No bacon," he reminds his dad, who rolls his eyes. "He'll hate it as much as you do, if that's any consolation."

"Not really," his dad says and gets to work.

Stiles' smile widens. If his dad hadn't complained, he would have known something was wrong. This is how they roll.

*

Derek is already awake and watching him when he comes back into the room.

"I think I'm done waiting, too," he says slowly, like it takes great concentration to get the words out.

Stiles breathes in sharply. He's no longer used to holding his tongue for the benefit of people who aren't in the same room. "You should be. You've been at it much longer."

"Yeah," Derek says.

"Breakfast?" Stiles offers. "But you're taking a shower first. No offense, dude, but you reek like you've been living in a car."

Derek looks shifty.

"You have!"

Derek glowers at him, but doesn't deny it.

"Man, you'll have to tell me all about your adventures some time."

"Yeah," Derek says. He rises to his feet, cups Stiles' face and presses their lips together in a quick, chaste, sweet kiss. "I think I will."

Breathless from just this small contact, Stiles slides his hands up to Derek's neck and touches his forehead to Derek's. "Man, I'm going to bore you to tears, so many tears, rambling about my computer science courses, and my asshole TAs, and the awesome frat parties, and my stupid, stupid student jobs. You have no idea what you're in for. Be warned."

"I can't wait," Derek says and closes his eyes.


End file.
